Aziraphale 100
by Lucillia
Summary: A hundred short stories featuring our favorite angel and his friends - and enemies, bookstore, books, pets, the people around him etc... Companion piece to Crowley 100.


Because they're two sides to the same coin, and you can't have one without the other, without further ado, here's Aziraphale 100:

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**001 Beginnings.**

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As far as Aziraphale was concerned, one of the few good things to come out of the Fourteenth century was the start of his actual friendship with Crowley. Sure, they'd met in the Garden, and had come to an Arrangement thousands of years later, but they hadn't actually been friends until the day Crowley had gone out of his way to rescue one of his books.

The book in question was a text which had been brought from the Orient by a trade caravan that had journeyed along the Silk Road. Aziraphale had treasured it because of its rarity in Europe. The local priest who wasn't quite as literary minded as many of his ilk however held it in no such regard, declaring it heresy upon catching sight of it and ordering it burned, and Aziraphale along with it if he refused to relinquish it.

Aziraphale, who had been ordered to not interfere in the matter by his higher-ups as the text in question contained the sacred writings of another religion which had raised questions about the angel in their minds, had been inconsolable. At least until the book in question had vanished from the fire and re-appeared in his home in better than new condition with a note from a certain demon that was.

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**002 Middles.**

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Aziraphale frowned as he watched the rather odd way his demon friend was eating the strange dark biscuits that looked a bit like Jammy Dodgers except for the fact that that they were black and filled with something that was white which he was apparently just snacking on rather than saving for his tea. Rather than eating them as one would normally eat a biscuit, Crowley was opening them, licking out the middles, and then eating the presumably chocolate flavored outsides.

Crowley, having apparently noticed his staring, decided to offer him one of the biscuits. Biting into it, he found that it tasted rather strange. After watching him eat the biscuit, Crowley informed him that he was eating it wrong, which puzzled him because he didn't know that there was a wrong way to eat a biscuit, except for maybe with gravy which made him wonder why the Americans were insane enough to do so.

Following Crowley's instructions, he opened the biscuit and licked at the white filling which was insanely sweet. Though he shouldn't have, he asked his friend what the strange white filling was, and learned that it was sweetened lard of all things.

The barbecue flavored crisps were much more to his liking, though he couldn't for the life of him figure out why Crowley found it so funny that he'd eaten half the bag in one sitting.

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**003 Ends. **

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Aziraphale smirked as he watched Crowley flick the ends of his hair out of his eyes. He knew that the demon would be happy when shorter hair became fashionable once more, or at the very least slicked-back hair. He knew how the demon felt because he'd spent millennia pushing long blond curls out of his own face until it had become fashionable to either tie it back or cut it short. Soon enough, this fashion of keeping one's hair in a mop that was long enough to get into one's eyes but too short to tie back the way that band that was named after a bug did would end and Crowley would be less irritable for a while until he found something else that was hair related to grumble about much like the demon used to grumble about his nasty habit of chewing on the ends of the long blond curls each of his bodies came with that he'd picked up somewhere before the Roman habit of cutting one's hair close to the head had sorted it out.

If he had a Denarius for every time Crowley had said "I refuse to be killed by an idiot who can't tell the difference between his hair and food." back then, he would have been a very wealthy angel. Fortunately, that habit, like all things do, came to an end. Which was a good thing in this case, as he'd been told that it made him look nervous and high-strung.

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**004 Insides. **

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Aziraphale had been accidentally discorporated by Crowley more than he'd been discorporated by the demon on purpose. The ratio stood somewhere near 2:1, with the vast majority of those accidental discorporations happening in the middle of a drinking game of some sort. One of the more recent deaths had involved them making a game of grabbing their next bottle of wine. Crowley had suggested that they use that logic puzzle from the first Harry Potter book, and he'd been just drunk enough to take him up on it.

After about a half hour of drunkenly deciphering the clues and studying the bottles that had been lined up on the coffee table while Crowley laughed until he cried, he'd grabbed a bottle that he was reasonably certain was wine.

Unfortunately, Crowley had been in a bit of a pranking mood and all of the bottles had contained death in their insides. Fortunately, the death they contained wasn't a permanent one for an angel.

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**005 Outsides.**

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As the saying goes, you can never tell a book by its cover. But, when it comes to an angel looking at the outsides of the people around them, they could get pretty damn close without using their God-given sixth sense. Being an angel, aside from the fact that one could spot things that almost every human in existence misses, one lives long enough to learn patterns well enough to play the induction/deduction game so well that Sherlock Holmes himself would be green with envy. Watch people often enough, and you could tell when a nail-biting habit was the result of deep seated anxieties, and when a nail-biting habit was just a nail-biting habit which had probably been started when the person was short a pair of nail-clippers.

Of course, that was probably just Aziraphale who'd spent several thousand years on Earth. No other angel had cared enough to take the time to learn how to do so, nor had the inclination to do so either. As far as Aziraphale knew that was.

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**006. Hours. **

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It had been hours, and Crowley had resolutely refused to help Newt Pulsifer deal with his anxieties over being a first-time father. Rather than comforting the poor man who hadn't been expecting this day to come so soon, Crowley was sitting in the corner grumbling about the fact that he'd been dragged to the birth of the Pulsifer-Device family's firstborn.

He hadn't entirely wanted to be here himself seeing as childbirth was a messy process he didn't care for no matter how many times he'd failed to avoid witnessing it, but Newton Pulsifer and Anathema Device were friends, and it would be exceedingly rude of him to turn down the invitation that the couple had tendered.

"Couldn't you be a little more helpful dear?" he asked his equal opposite while Newt breathed into a paper bag in order to keep from passing out while his wife screamed an obscenity laced diatribe at the poor man for having been stupid enough to forget the condom and therefore having done this to her.

She would eventually calm down. They always did. But, it was alarming to listen to in the meantime. Especially since Aziraphale had counted at least three incidents of blasphemy.

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**007 Days. **

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The kid had been a runaway who'd come to London because he'd been hearing stories about the city all of his life and figured he could make his way in the big city now that he was a grown-up twelve year-old. What the boy had waiting for him back home wasn't all that much better than homelessness, so he wasn't as afraid of the prospect as many of his sheltered peers would be. Of course, many of those peers wouldn't have been too afraid either, but that would've been out of ignorance due to their sheltered existences, and they would've been far more willing to return home and apologize to their families after a night out in the cold than he was.

Being no Dick Whittington, the boy in question could've ended up being another sad statistic had the child not found his way to and into Aziraphale's shop where he'd come to get out of the cold. Rather than being insolent, lazy, or a thief the child was bright, helpful and willing to do an honest day's work to earn his keep. Not having much to do around the shop, he had ended up sending the boy out on several makework tasks around the city so the child could feel useful.

It being the latter half of the twentieth century, and the area the shop was in being known for certain shall we say alternative lifestyles, it wasn't too long before the authorities were called in regards to the boy. Soon after they were called, they arrived to take the boy away, giving Aziraphale openly suspicious looks the entire time.

The shop felt surprisingly empty after the boy had gone, as did the angel. It had only been a handful of days, but the child had taken a piece of his heart with him when he'd left.

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**008 Weeks. **

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There were fifty-two weeks to a year. Fifty-two Sundays that Aziraphale should've been attending church. What church didn't matter just so long as it wasn't the Church of Satan. The angel tried to - pardon the pun - religiously follow this schedule, but some years things came up and he found himself attending maybe forty-nine or fifty times a year rather than the full fifty-two. One particularly bad year had found him attending only twenty-seven times.

Though he should feel joyful at the prospect of worshiping Him in His house amongst His creation, attending church tended to feel like an obligation to him. An obligation that he felt guiltier and guiltier over every time he failed to meet it, even if it was through no fault of his own.

It was hard to find and attend a church in say a warzone where every miracle he could provide was needed to save the poor men on the battlefield so they could probably make it home to their families who loved and missed them for instance...

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**009 Months. **

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There was a nasty habit that Crowley had once tempted him into taking up before the demon had taken that long nap that had lasted the vast majority of the Nineteenth-century. A habit which was socially acceptable for a good century or two, starting off as a nasty habit, and becoming a nasty habit again in recent times.

Aziraphale didn't smoke all that often, and usually did it only in social situations where everyone else in the group was smoking, and months could go between cigarettes or cigars or a bowl of pipe tobacco. But still, the angel was a smoker, and thanks to a rather ill thought out experiment, he could attest to the fact that tobacco was more addictive than heroin.

A cigarette once every three to six months may not seem like all that much, but to an angel it was roughly equivalent to a pack a day for a human. And, no matter how many times the poor angel who cursed the discovery of certain methods of administering drugs and other substances that may as well have been drugs tried, he'd completely failed to kick the habit.

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**010 Years.**

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Some years are better than others, and if nothing particularly memorable happens, such as an Apocalypse that wasn't for instance, one year will bleed into the next for Aziraphale. Though he doesn't like to show it, the long years he'd spent on Earth where the passing of time was far more evident than it was in Heaven or even Hell was grinding him down, inexorably wearing him away bit by bit like a bit of cliffside on the shore is slowly worn away and eroded to almost nothing over time by the pounding surf.

Looking into Crowley's eyes, he can see the same is happening to the demon. The demon is slowly being worn away just as he is, but unlike him, Crowley can take refuge in sleep.

Sometimes, he's afraid that Crowley will one day stop and take refuge in slumber, sleeping through the remainder of eternity while he is eroded away to nearly nothing and finally collapses into the tides of time, no longer able to hold himself up.

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**011 Red.**

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The first time he had seen actual blood, it had shocked and confused him. It had been his own blood which had been spilled in crimson gouts when Crowley had discorporated him, looking stunned as the body in which he traveled around on Earth which was still in its early days died. The second time he'd seen blood in any sizable quantity had been when the foul red substance had been spilled during the first murder. It had shocked him to his core to see young Abel's blood soaking into the ground like that.

After seeing blood spilled on a variety of surfaces, fresh and crimson, dried to a rust brown, inky shiny blackness under the light of the moon, he'd almost become inured to the sight. No matter what he did, no matter how many times he tried to stop it, humans killed other humans much as Cain had done Abel.

There were times when he wondered if he and Crowley had brought murder into the world. Cain who had been a young child at the time had witnessed his first discorporation after-all.

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**012 Orange. **

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Aziraphale scowled down at the bright orange liquid which was a shade that couldn't be found in nature. Ostensibly, it was supposed to smell like oranges, and to the humans it probably did. To an angel's more sensitive nose however, it was nothing but a bunch of pungent chemicals that had been blended together to make something that approximated the scent of orange soda which also didn't smell like oranges and was also of a shade that was not found in nature.

Sighing, he dumped a portion of the bottle's contents into a bucket before turning on the tap and filling the bucket with hot water. As soon as the bucket was half-way full, he grabbed a mop, dipped it into the bucket, and got to work. No matter how many times he washed them later that day, the stench of the cleanser didn't come off of his hands.

It was his fault however for being so soft-hearted as to install a restroom in his shop.

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**013 Yellow. **

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It was Spring, and the grass of St. James Park was dotted with bright yellow flowers. Aziraphale and Crowley had come to feed the ducks as was their wont on occasion. After Aziraphale had chided Crowley for sinking yet another of the ducks, the demon sighed, plucked one of the yellow blossoms that didn't quite match his eyes from the plant that many considered a weed, and gave it an impatient look.

Where moments before there had been a golden-yellow flower, there was the fluffy white head of a Dandelion going to seed. It was perfectly rounded in a way that Dandelions never were, and not a single seed was a nanometer out of place, nor were any missing.

"Make a wish angel." Crowley said as he handed the stem over to Aziraphale.

"I really wish you wouldn't do that to those poor plants." Aziraphale said with an exasperated sigh as he took the proffered gift.

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**014. Green. **

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To Aziraphale, green wasn't the color of envy, it was the color of terror, and it was all Crowley's fault it was so. Green had been an ordinary color of which there was a decided overabundance of when compared to other colors to him, then Crowley happened. Or Crowley's plants had happened rather.

He honestly didn't know why Crowley persisted in keeping plants since he wasn't the nurturing sort, the kind which a garden truly needs to grow well. How the plants in Crowley's care managed to survive for as long as they did in spite of Crowley's "tender mercies" he didn't know either.

Every time that he visited the place that Crowley for lack of a better word called home, the near-palpable sense of fear nearly drove him out the door. If those poor leafy green creatures could quail in fear or scream in terror, they'd be doing it non-stop.

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**015 Blue. **

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Despite the fact that it was one of the primary colors of Heaven and the color of a sign of Heavenly workings, Aziraphale isn't all that fond of blue. Blue is a cold color and associated with the cold, and Aziraphale who should love all things in God's creation cannot bring himself to feel more than ambivalence for cold things, for static and unchanging things that seem to sit there lifeless and completely frozen.

Sure, he can find beauty in things that have blue on them or in them, but blue by itself he can leave.

Blue was a color of perfection to many who didn't see it the way Aziraphale did. Clear, cloudless, icy, chilly perfection. The complete antithesis of fire. Fire which brings warmth and life with it as well as pain and death. But, you can't have one without the other, otherwise the other would be completely meaningless.

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**016 Purple. **

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He couldn't remember the discorporation all that clearly. One second he'd been crossing the road and the next, his body was gone and he was being pranked by Death who didn't seem to have anything better to do (again), and then he was filling out paperwork in order to get himself a new body (again). Eventually, after all of the paperwork was in order he was being sent back to Earth in a new body. Rather than occupying his usual and rather squishy middle-aged form which he was comfortable with, he was a teenager this time. A spotty teenager with a voice that cracked at the most inopportune moments who was a good four inches taller than he used to be, and therefore could not fit into his old clothes.

He had very tactfully not asked Crowley where the money he'd handed him before he'd sent him clothes shopping was from. He had put it to good use however. The first thing he'd done was nip into a second hand shop and yank some random clothes off the rack because the robes he'd left Heaven in had gone out of fashion ages ago, and were no-longer appropriate attire, and people had been staring at him because of this. After ditching the robe, he headed out to properly shop for the clothes he would be wearing until he reached something approximating his adult form.

After following a number of young people from whom he should be taking his sartorial cues, he found a shop that looked to be promising.

The denim trousers that he'd decided to purchase had not been in the men's section of the store. But then again, despite his outward appearance and the masculine pronouns he habitually used in reference to himself due to lack of a better word since "it" absolutely wouldn't do, he wasn't exactly a man. He'd never really bothered to make much of an effort either way, so there was a side of him that had squealed over the absolutely beautiful shade of purple, and started gushing about how he absolutely had to have those jeans.

Looking at the trousers in the fitting room, he could say that that shade of purple was absolutely fitting for him.

Crowley however had begged to differ.

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**017 Brown. **

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There was one color that seemed to be common to the human race, and seemed to sum it up in Aziraphale's mind, and that color was brown. Almost every single human being on the planet had a bit of brown on them somewhere, be it on their head, in their eyes, or on their skin somewhere even if it was just a tiny blemish. Some had it to a much greater degree than others. Brown was the color of earth, and brown was the color of Man who was destined to return to the earth from whence he came.

Unless Crowley wears something with it in it, he doesn't have a speck of brown on him. He'd learned this ages ago when they'd been forced to strip down and swim for their lives a few centuries back (long story). Unless he wears it in his clothing, he doesn't have a single speck of brown on himself either. Not a single trace of the earth from which Mankind had sprung.

He's checked.

Dozens of times.

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**018 Black. **

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If one looked at Crowley's hair, or rather the hair that belonged to the body Crowley inhabited while on Earth long enough, one would realize that it wasn't a true black. Aziraphale had seen Crowley often enough to absorb this little fact, even though he wasn't particularly paying attention most of the time, though the effects of certain lighting on Crowley's hair was rather interesting to watch.

Unlike most people with black hair, there wasn't a brown or an iridescent midnight-blue undertone. With Crowley, there was hints of golds and reds and oranges. Under the right lighting, it almost looked as if there were fire contained in each inky strand. A shift of the head at the right moment, and the light seemed to crackle and blaze along the perfectly combed onyx strands in a manner that seemed to almost be alive.

Even though it was possibly hellfire that was reflected in the black of Crowley's hair which meant that he should look away, Aziraphale sometimes found it mesmerizing to watch nonetheless

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**019 White. **

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The thing Aziraphale remembers most about Heaven is white. The color that isn't a color, but rather an absence of color is everywhere. There are other colors, but blue and white are predominant, almost drowning out the golds, the reds, the oranges, the purples, and the colors that the humans had no name for because they fall so far outside the spectrum that makes up the visual range for that species that no human will ever be able to perceive them. Of course, that could've changed in the millennia since he'd done more than sit around in a small corner of Heaven that looks exactly as it had done since the beginning waiting for a new body, but he didn't think that was the case.

Angels were notorious for being resistant to change, they were blue (static) and white (mostly devoid of individual personality). Since the angels were pretty much in charge, odds were that the color scheme would remain the same throughout the rest of eternity.

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**020 Colorless. **

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Aziraphale gave a drunken smile as Crowley knocked back a shot of colorless liquid from an equally clear glass. He didn't know how humans kept coming up with these clever games nor where Crowley kept finding them, but shotglass checkers played with Whiskey and Vodka was fun. At least, Crowley thought what he was drinking was Vodka.

His smile was short lived because Crowley's next move cinched the game for the demon. After he'd drank the last of the Whiskey shots on the board, the disheveled creature from hell suggested that they play another game.

Being rather smashed and determined to win once more, Aziraphale who was in his shirtsleeves as he'd discarded his coat and vest hours ago, and whose blond curls were decidedly rumpled from constantly running his hand through them in concentration agreed to yet another game, their eighth of the evening, and set up the board.

This time, he was reasonably certain he would win. It could probably be considered cheating, but he'd switched Crowley's Vodka with Everclear when he wasn't paying attention two games back and sooner or later the effects were going to show and he'd finally end his losing streak and win another game, bringing their evening to a tie.

Crowley, who was rather enjoying the game with the angel smirked from across the board. In his opinion, switching the angel's Whiskey with Everclear but leaving it the Whiskey's golden color at the beginning of the evening had been a decidedly brilliant move on his part. Besides, there had only ever been one occasion when one of them had been discorporated through alcohol poisoning, and that had been after the angel had drank three gallons of Everclear on a dare, so there was no risk of that ruining their night.


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